Patience Worth Collection (VMF196), 1920-1980 | MSS Manuscripts

Worth, Patience

Patience Worth was allegedly a spirit contacted by Pearl Lenore Curran (February 15, 1883–December 4, 1937). This symbiotic relationship produced several novels, poetry and prose which Curran claimed was delivered to her through channeling the spirit, Patience Worth.

Curran was born Pearl Lenore Pollard in Mound City, Illinois. The family moved to Texas when she was eight months old and she started school when she was six. She was an average but uninterested student.  Her family moved to St. Louis when she was 14. Curran married John Howard Curran when she was 24.

Beginning in July 1912, Pearl Curran and her friend Emily Grant Hutchings were making a call on a neighbor who had an Ouija board and during that call there came what purported to be a message from a relative of Mrs. Hutchings. Mrs. Hutchings then bought an Ouija board and took it to Mrs. Curran's house with the idea of continuing the communications. On June 22, 191, a communication from "Pat-C" began to come through. Then on July 8, 1913 the board seemed to be possessed with unusual strength and supposed communications from Patience Worth began. Curran and Patience together wrote several novels including Telka, The Sorry Tale, Hope Trueblood, The Pot upon the Wheel, Samuel Wheaton, An Elizebethan Mask as well as several short stories and many poems.

The Patience Worth writings coincided with a revival of Spiritualism in the U.S. and Britain, capturing the interest of a population wanting to believe that an uneducated housewife could talk to a long dead Puritan woman. The skeptics had a field day, particularly when they noted that Patience was somehow able to write a novel about the Victorian age, which came some 200 years after she had lived.

The produced literature was considered to be first rate, for example by the distinguished and influential literary critic William Marion Reedy who considered The Sorry Tale to be a new classic of world literature. Patience Worth was also listed as one of the outstanding authors of 1918 by The Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York. She was also cited by William Stanley Braithwaite in the 1918 edition of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year Book of American Poetry by printing the complete text of five of her poems. Many people said that because of her poor education, Curran herself could not be composing the works.  After the death of her husband John Curran on June 1, 1922 who kept meticulous records of the Patience Worth sessions, the record of the Patience Worth sessions became episodic, fragmentary, with long gaps of time unaccounted for.